Today is the day when Dominic Cummings will send Boris Johnson to the daily news briefing in order to announce the end of semi-lockdown. Finally, we will be able to go in pubs, restaurants, bookies, barbershops and cinemas. State schools can wait, probably because no one in Johnsons’ cabinet of the untalented needs state schools for their own children. Levelling up can wait.
It’s good news, too, for people who have been shielding because of ‘underlying health issues’. They can now go back to work because their chances of meeting someone with COVID-19 are a mere one in 1700, as opposed to one in 400 hundred just a few weeks ago. This vulnerable group of people can now resume normal life although it’s important they don’t bump into that one in 1700 people on their travels.
Given the odds of dying in a plane crash are something like one in 53 million, one in 1700 suddenly doesn’t sound quite so good, but I suppose we can’t hide vulnerable people forever. That something like 70,000 vulnerable people have died due to the virus, it seems to me those being shielded are about to play a dangerous game of Russian roulette.
I wonder how people are feeling about these significant easing of the government’s half-arsed lockdown? I’m gasping for a pint in a pub but it won’t be in any old pub and certainly not a Wetherspoons. Spoons owner Tim Martin said at the outset of the pandemic that it would be “over the top” to close pubs and suggested that staff should go and work for Tescos if they couldn’t wait for his pubs to reopen. Martin operates on the basis of pack ’em in, sell it cheap, and given the clientele he attracts to some of his pubs, I suggest they will be a human petri dish. Let’s put it this way: if you are currently shielding, the Spoons might not be your best port of call. Actually, even if you aren’t, don’t go.
I can see no appeal in going to the cinema either. Yes, many, if not all, are air-conditioned but frankly I wouldn’t feel safe. The same goes for restaurants, if there are any life. I’ve gotten quite used to Amazon Prime and Netflix movies and series, accompanied by TV dinners. It’s safer and far, far cheaper.And I can actually stop the stream if I require a bathroom break.
Understandably, today’s grand reopening of society is wholly political. Scientists and medical officers will still believe the two metre social distancing rule is right and would, if given the choice, retain it. However, faced with the biggest economic crash in over 300 years, Cummings and Johnson have concluded to gamble with the health of the British people by opening up pretty well anything.
I think he’ll get away with it, too. Even with our staggering death total and our still high daily infection rate, the public by and large continues to give Johnson the benefit of the doubt. That will be, at least in part, because of his baffling levels of popularity and because people want to believe the government knows what it is doing and thinks we should all get behind them. That the handling of the crisis has been so disastrously poor has had only a marginal effect on Johnson’s levels of popularity. It’s a strange one.
At least I will get a haircut and spend the afternoon with my friends in town, after an hour or so pottering around Rough Trade and HMV. Hopefully, I won’t bump into that one in 1700 who might pass on the virus but you never know. For some, it could be the breath of death.
So get read to order that pint, put on that bet, get your barber to get those clippers to work and hope for the best. That’s what Cummings and Johnson are doing. It really is that simple.
